Saturday, February 24, 2007

"New released have been announced today by Mozilla, Firefox 2.0.0.2. Including mainly several security issues fixes, in addition to an enhanced Windows Vista Support, a fix in german translation, and four new languages : Afrikaans, Belarusian, Georgian, and Kurdish. If you didn't get already the update message, you can download it directly from Mozilla website. Vulnerabilities fixed in this release :

Thursday, February 22, 2007

Finally we see Google charging the users for their services with Google Apps Premier, i.e. a slightly more pro version of Google Apps (IMHO) for 50$ a year.

Google Apps for Your Domain was launched in August. The Google Apps for Your Domain page has already been updated to reflect tonight’s announcement. The service will include the existing Google Apps tools - GMail, Google Calendar, Google Talk and IM as well as the Google Docs applications that were just integrated into the suite today. Webmail will come with 10 GB of storage and Apps Premier includes service level agreements that promise 99.9% uptime and 24/7 tech support. A full comparison of the standard and Premier services can be found here.The service costs $50 per user per year, dramatically undercutting Microsoft’s offerings. Google’s package does not currently include a presentation tool like Power Point or a CRM application. The most likely next addition to the package could be an enterprise version of Blogger. General Electric and Proctor and Gamble are cited as among the first Google Apps Premier customers.

Monday, February 19, 2007

The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) just updated their look and feel to more Web2.0 style...I know this has nothing to do with Web2.0 - in any definition of the term - but it looks 21st century... finally.Anyway, it way my first favorite web site "back in the nineties" that truly understood the value of linking, linking, linking... it was (and still is) so easy to get lost within imdb but just following link after link after link.Like

What also played in ?

Where did he/she also play?

repeat ad inf.

I just love it. Still the #1 reason to switch on the PC while watching a DVD...

Mostly when you present - especially with a customer - you struggle with the most basic settings at their conference or meeting room.Just yesterday a colleague of mine did not get his notebook (DELL) to work with the video beamers of two different customer's. I managed to back up with my notebook (IBM, and I'm proud of it) at one location without any problems, but not at the other ... it forced me to switch my resolution down to 800... uargh...

Image that in that situation you also have to struggle with network and internet connectivity. Many of my customers are quite paranoid when it comes to having visitor laptops in their network, and they don't usually have Wifi.So especially when it comes to presentations I still like to have them strictly offline.

Then again, you might use just and PC provided by the customer... and there's no need to have OpenOffice/StarOffice or PowerPoint installed...Come to think of it, this really might make sense.

So lets wait and see what Google will have to offer.Maybe they will provide a nice little offline tool to (just) run your presentation, or save/download it as a PDF to take along...

I finally installed the URL Fixer extension into my FireFox today (works for all mozilla based browsers).What it does is, it tries to fix common typos in the address bar, e.g..cmo to .com and similar things.

Sadly it currently has no options page, i.e. cannot be configured. So we have to live with whatever the author comes up with and builds into it.

I surely hope there will be an option page soon. For his own sake, he doesn't want to chase every possible typo and release a new version for it... Apart from probably conflicting interests like there is a request to change .jo to .jp just because some Japanese users frequently mistypes .jp as .jo. Of course this would be convenient for him, but what would people of Jordan (.jo) think ? Or will someone from Jordan soon request .jp to be "fixed" to .jo.

Imagine you're a legislator that writes a law, or a doctor that drafts a patient's record, or a student that writes a novel. And that five years or fifty years from now, you want to return to review your documents. Except the vendor that created the application used to draft those documents, the company that created the word processor, has either gone out of business, or decided to charge you $10,000 for a version capable of reading old file formats. Either scenario makes the point: Information always outlives technology.

I bought some memory (512 MB DDR 333) for my home PC today, and - now thats the fun part - I managed to get that done between 2 consecutive underground trains (tube, metro, whatever you like to call them):

Get out of the train

out of the station

across the road and into the shop

ask for the memory, pay,

get back to the station, see the train arriving (start to run),

board the train and see the same persons that entered the platform when I left earlier

Sadly in the past week(s) my Netgear MR314 started to let me down on the Wifi.Worked like a charm for about 4 years now, but now the Wifi seems broken. Neither my Palm (T|X) nor my IBM ThinkPad are able to connect. And I triple-checked the settings... Ethernet still works fine.I really loved this box, the last series of Netgear that just worked without problems. It just had 802.11b though, but I rarely cared (only when I had to transfer large files from the ThinkPad to the PC or v.v., but then I just plugged the ThinkPad to the (wired) Ethernet).So, I'm gonna start looking for a Linksys ... or a used MR314... if I can get one for under 5€ ...

Thursday, February 08, 2007

Well, interop betwwen MS Office and OpenOffice/StarOffice just got a bit easier. Now I finally don't ave to feel that bad when sending ODF files.Still, converting them to PDF before sending will remain a good practice (in most cases).

"The site has a single function - to create a new account. [...] Once you’ve created your account, you can log in, and edit your account. That’s it. The reason this is really, really funny (for us) is because that’s what we do all day - create new account after new account at every new Internet startup that comes along. I am a seriously huge expert on account creation."

Tuesday, February 06, 2007

It appears that HP's fondness for Sun Microsystems' Solaris operating system has returned. The hardware maker today announced quick support for the latest version of Solaris across a number of its Intel-based servers.

Take for example the printf and its formatting syntax... where most of use were rejoicing when this good old C feature finally made it to Java.However, a typo in the format string will not be caught be the compiler, but only by a runtime exception.

Similar situation with annotations, since they all have their configuration or parameters in syntactically unchecked strings. No compiler support for typos.

Sunday, February 04, 2007

The 0.7.10 Flock Maintenance Patch has several enhancements and bug fixes including: * Added support for Blogger Beta auto detection * Added a progress bar when adding photos to the Photo Uploader * Added support for .bmp type photos * Open or closed state of the photobar is preserved across Flock restarts * Better error messaging and error handling when uploading photos to Photobucket.